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Art on a Green Line is the name of an art exhibition featuring the work of the War Generation Artists at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada between January 19 and April 14, 2015. The exhibition was curated by Johnny Alam and featured in several articles (See below).
Between 1975 and 1990, Lebanon was a battleground for local, regional, and international conflicts commonly referred to as the Civil Wars by foreigners and as the "foreign wars on our grounds," or the "Ahdeth" [events], by the Lebanese. Beirut was split by competing ideologies that divided the nation. East Beirut was controlled by the Christian parties claiming to fight for the preservation of the Lebanese nation-state against increasing Palestinian militancy. West Beirut was controlled by a coalition of Palestinian, Leftist, and Muslim parties claiming to fight for the primacy of the Palestinian cause, against a hegemonic Christian regime. A demarcation line separating East and West Beirut came to be known as the Green Line.
While the origin of this designation is not certain, the Green Line aptly described the post-apocalyptic cityscape it traversed, where streets and buildings were overtaken by wild vegetation. Although the boundary has ceased to exist physically, it still remains psychologically present today as a negative site of memory that has at least two levels of meaning. First, it is a symbol of atrocity, a location of ruthless battles, kidnappings, and war crimes. Second, it represents a national identity crisis that continues to divide citizens along ideological lines. It is hard to think of a better location to start writing the unwritten official history of the ongoing Lebanese wars and to document their intergenerational traumas.
Featuring Hassan Choubassi, Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige, Merdad Hage, Lamia Joreige, Jayce Salloum, and Pierre Sidaoui, this exhibition presents a collection of wartime narratives that are intriguingly woven across a rich variety of media, including photographs, videos, books, postcards, and even a metro map. The makers of these works offer vivid experiences of everyday life during wartime, which history books simply cannot convey. The artists' firsthand experience of war at an early age gives their stories a heightened sense of reality. In their works, they blur the lines between truth and fiction, past and present, memory and history, home and exile, and personal and collective trauma. Each work comes to operate as an alternative form of history and memory, transporting knowledge and narratives about the Lebanese wars across borders, places and times. [1]
Reviews of this exhibition and interviews with the curator appeared in the Ottawa Citizen Scenes from the Green Line: Art and the war in Lebanon, Herd Magazine Narratives of Conflict: Johnny Alam and Akram Zaatari at CUAG, L'Hebdo Magazine Au Carleton Curatorial Laboratory. L’art décortique «la ligne verte de Beyrouth», Study28 Art on a Green Line curator asks "How do we remember?" , and Apartment613 among others. [2] [3] [1] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
The Lebanese Civil War was a multifaceted armed conflict that took place from 1975 to 1990. It resulted in an estimated 120,000 fatalities and an exodus of almost one million people from Lebanon.
Elias Khoury is a Lebanese novelist and public intellectual. His novels and literary criticism have been translated into several languages. In 2000, he won the Prize of Palestine for his book Gate of the Sun, and he won the Al Owais Award for fiction writing in 2007. Khoury has also written three plays and two screenplays.
The Rashidieh camp is the second most populous Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon, located on the Mediterranean coast about five kilometres south of the city of Tyre (Sur).
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Johnny Alam is a Canadian researcher, visual artist, and curator. His art and research revolve around questions of memory, technology and representation with a special interest in photography, history and war.
Nayla Tamraz is a Lebanese writer, art critic, curator, researcher and professor of Literature and Art History at Saint Joseph University of Beirut. She obtained her PhD in Comparative Literature from the New Sorbonne University in 2004.
Joana Hadjithomas and Khalil Joreige are Lebanese filmmakers and artists. Their work includes feature and documentary films, video and photographic installations, sculpture, performance lectures and texts.
Nada Sehnaoui is a visual artist and political activist. Her artworks, spanning painting, mixed media works, sculpture and installations, have been widely exhibited internationally, and have been featured in the press and print publications worldwide.
Jayce Salloum is a Canadian multidisciplinary artist.
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